Postma, Pat

ORAL HISTORY OF PATRICIA POSTMA
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 29, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel, and today is Tuesday, November 29, 2011, and I am at the home of Pat Postma, and Pat, thanks for taking time to talk with us.
MRS. POSTMA: I am delighted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Well, we're going to talk about a lot of different things, but I want to start out with you, with your life. Tell me where you were born and raised, and something about your family.
MRS. POSTMA: Well, I was really raised here, but born in eastern Kentucky. My dad had been principal of a mountain boarding school, and decided, when I came along as the second and unexpected child, he needed to earn a little more money, so they went to Lexington and he was teaching in the Army Signal Corps, which is one of the places, apparently, they recruited when they were beginning Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was this?
MRS. POSTMA: We came here in September of 1943. I was four years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: I do vividly remember that first day coming into town, because you know the stories about the mud, and we lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- on the corner of Fairview and Tennessee Avenue, and Tennessee was mud and Fairview was mud, and, as we got out of our little car and we were getting ready to carry things up, I got to carry my mother's hat boxes. She was a very stylish lady, and as I got out of the car, she said, "Be careful and don't drop those," and I hadn't taken two steps before I slipped in the mud. So, when we talk about Oak Ridge, it's not generic mud, its hatbox mud.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, this was '43? You were four years old --
MRS. POSTMA: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and your dad came here. What did he come here to do?
MRS. POSTMA: He was an electronics foreman at Y-12. I think he was in one of the calutron buildings, but I'm not sure which one.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, did you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. POSTMA: I had an older sister, Mary. She was 15 months older than I am, and later I had a brother, but not at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, you moved to the corner of Tennessee and --
MRS. POSTMA: And Fairview.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and Fairview.
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it a house or apartment?
MRS. POSTMA: It was a B house, and really it looks a lot now, like it did then, although it has siding on it, and, needless to say, the whole yard was mud. But one of the funny things, to me I guess -- I don't know why I would have thought this was funny -- but the closets didn't have doors, they had curtains. I guess, we were probably lucky to have closets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We used to play hide-and-seek and hide behind those curtains and everything. I remember my folks working really hard, my dad in particular, for the yard, and he would go out somewhere and dig up sod and bring it back. And my folks went out and collected wildflowers, and we had a wildflower garden in the back, so they worked pretty hard to make it look like a --
MR. MCDANIEL: A home.
MRS. POSTMA: -- place that people cared about --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and we lived there until I was in the sixth grade.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, what can you remember? What are some of the things you remember about that, those early days from '43 until, I guess, about, what, the late '40s or '50s?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, gosh, a lot of things. I loved the fact that we lived near Jackson Square. That was a block away. If I was lucky enough to have a nickel, I could go get Cherry Cokes, and every time I go to Big Ed's Pizza, I am amazed at how much it still looks like Service Drugstore.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's where Service Drugstore was?
MRS. POSTMA: It was, and the booths, I swear the booths are the same ones they were then, and the wooden floor. It is just really funny. But McCrory's, you know, going to the Five-and-Dime, and walking down all those aisles and seeing all the stuff you really wanted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, McCrory's, where was it? It was just right down from --
MRS. POSTMA: It was. I'm trying to think. Where Bechtel Jacobs --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: It was in that same block with what's now Big Ed's.
MR. MCDANIEL: Past the Ridge Theater right there.
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, and the Music Box on the corner, that was a neat place, but my favorite place was the Library, I loved to read, and the Public Library was just beyond Jackson Square, what was then -- after that was the Executive Building. I don't know what it's used for now. But I would go to the Public Library, and it was such a safe place, the whole world was then, I think, and we could just go anywhere, any time. I would go to the Library and get books, and, as I got older, I would wander around the Library. I didn't stay in the children's section, nobody said I shouldn't go there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I would just pull a book off the shelf, and if I flipped through a couple pages and liked it, I brought it up, and I am sure I read a lot of things before my time. I got an education that I wouldn't have gotten any other way if I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- hadn't had that Library to have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember who the Librarian was?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh no, I don't.
MR. MCDANIEL: I interviewed a lady, and I don't remember her name just right off, but she was the Librarian for 25 or 30 years. So, I don't know if she was there that --
MRS. POSTMA: Then?
MR. MCDANIEL: -- early or not, but --
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- she was.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. So, Jackson Square was a great place to live. As I read other people's -- in Jay Searcy's book, that I'm sure you're familiar with, his high school class wrote about Oak Ridge, everybody talked about the woods, and I hadn't really thought about that. But it's really unusual, I guess, to have a closely-packed town like this, but covered around by woods and in the woods, and we would just wander around and not come home until dark, sort of, and had a great time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and I imagine there were lots of kids.
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, there were. In particular -- I mean there were a lot of friends. I was two blocks away from Elm Grove School. I was in that first kindergarten class at Elm Grove School, and so, as I walked along to school, there were a lot of my friends who lived there and on the streets we lived on. But, when we moved to New York Avenue when I was in the sixth grade, that's when I really think about the schools had a playground program in the summer that was free, and you could go down on the playground, and our house looked right down on it. We could walk down the hill.
MR. MCDANIEL: Pine, what --
MRS. POSTMA: Pine Valley.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Pine Valley School.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, and my dad was Principal of the High School by then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, no, Principal of Pine Valley at that time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- when we moved there. But we'd spend time in the day there, but one of my fondest memories are what we did after dark, and we would play Capture the Flag, about seven or eight of us in the neighborhood, that went all up and down New York Avenue, and go for hours in the summer nights.
MR. MCDANIEL: What's your maiden name?
MRS. POSTMA: Dunigan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. He came here, as I said --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you lived next to -- Helen was your mother, is that --
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- correct?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. I wasn't aware of that.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: You lived next to the Wilcox --
MRS. POSTMA: Exactly.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- family, right?
MRS. POSTMA: Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. My dad, he was laid off after the war, like many, many others, and they had come here, as I suppose almost everybody did, with the thought they'd be here during the war and then they'd go back home, wherever that was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: But they didn't want to leave, and my dad had been a teacher before, and applied to the school system. They hired him with the proviso that he had to get a master's degree. I don't know if you're aware, but back in 1943, when they set up the school, and that is a whole story by itself --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course.
MRS. POSTMA: -- almost every teacher had a master's degree, and you think about that -- how many people didn't even go to college in 19 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so rare, especially --
MRS. POSTMA: -- right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- for East Tennessee, this area.
MRS. POSTMA: Exactly. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Any school system.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and so one of my real memories from those early days is he spent the summers going to UT. He taught the high school Algebra and Physics, I think, and in the summer went to UT, and I remember my mother typing his thesis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: There was a card table set up in the middle of the living room floor in our B house, and it was kind of sacred. We sort of tiptoed around it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I recently got interested in looking up some of that history, and it turned out, even though that was 1949, I guess, when he got his degree, they still have his thesis at the Library --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I got to read part of it, which was about the Oak Ridge school workshops, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- that was really interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, my goodness. So, you moved to New York Avenue --
MRS. POSTMA: We moved to New York Avenue, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- when you were in the sixth grade.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. So, I got to go to Elm Grove. I went in the seventh grade to, what's now, Robertsville. It was called Jefferson then. Then, when they built the new High School, I went to the old High School and that was Jefferson, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Up --
MRS. POSTMA: And so I --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- on the hill?
MRS. POSTMA: -- up on the hill. So, I went to all of the schools, I think, when I was growing up here, and that was kind of neat.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what was it like being a teenager here? This was after the war, this was in the '50s.
MRS. POSTMA: Yes. Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you know, tell me about that.
MRS. POSTMA: You know, I think about that, and one of the big things in the life of teenagers, I believe, was the Wildcat Den, and yet, my sister and I never went there, or much. I thought about why that was really central to some people, but not to others, and I don't have an answer for that, but we didn't do that. It was really exciting, in the sense of the high school, even when you're in junior high school, they had championship football teams, and we'd go to the football games along with 12,000 other people, which was pretty remarkable for a high school, to watch, and I couldn't wait until I got to go to the high school itself, because I thought that was great. But my dad got there before I was, he became the principal of the high school, and I thought, "Well, being the principal's daughter had some," -- every now and then, something would come up that made it funny, but on the whole, I thought it was okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: But at my 50th high school reunion, it was really funny how many people, I guess enough time had gone by, came up to me and said, "I spent some time in your dad's office," and, for the most part, I would never have guessed. You know, they were kids who you didn't think of as troublemakers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. POSTMA: One person, who I didn't really know very well, I knew he was in high school but I didn't know him, and figured he might not know who I was, and I said, "I was Pat Dunigan," and he said, "I know who you were. You were the principal's daughter," and I said, "Yeah, that's right." He paused and he said, "That cost you a lot of boyfriends, girl."
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MRS. POSTMA: You know, I swear, it had never occurred to me. I just didn't think I was the popular type. So, that was kind of a revelation, and I wondered how much else I didn't know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I thought being the principal's daughter was okay, but I didn't know half.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it took 50 years for you to find out.
MRS. POSTMA: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: But there were lots of activities for kids, I guess.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. Well, like I said, the playground programs, and you could be a coach or a -- I don't know whether they called them coaches, but you could work at the playgrounds in the summer, and my sister and I did that some. The swimming pool was a really big deal, and like today, it was terribly crowded. There were heads everywhere and that was a big part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, speaking of the swimming pool, people have told me that at one point, at 5:00, the alarm went off every day at 5:00 --
MRS. POSTMA: Okay, that's right. I had forgotten that.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and that's when everybody knew to leave the swimming pool and go home for supper. Do you remember that?
MRS. POSTMA: -- well, I don't remember that as part of the way, and where we lived on New York Avenue, I could walk to the high school and walk to the swimming pool.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: And we did that, we walked everywhere, really, although for a long time we had a very good bus system here, and that was great. What was really neat was by the time I got to college, Oak Ridge was a haven, or I might -- no, a heaven for single girls. Every summer, the Lab and Y-12 would hire graduate students in science from all over the country from the best schools, and there were dozens of these very bright, young men, and we had a youth group that met at the church. It wasn't really a religious group itself, but every Sunday night there would be 40 or 50 people there, and we'd make some collective dinner or something, and it was just amazing the opportunities to meet people and date, and I did meet my husband that way after many years. He dated everybody else in Oak Ridge before he got around to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: But, I think, that was probably a very unique aspect of Oak Ridge, that this opportunity to meet young people, who were highly educated and from all over the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: As a young person, as you look back on it, do you think there was a downside? Do you think there was something so unique about Oak Ridge that maybe you missed out on something else?
MRS. POSTMA: No, I couldn't possibly see it that way. At one of our reunions, the president of our high school class gave a speech, and he called it Camelot, and that kind of pegs it. My brother-in-law, who didn't grow up here and only knew by hearsay what Oak Ridge was like, said, "You lived in a fairytale."
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: As I think back on it, I think that's true. I mean the whole world was much simpler and safer then, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: And particularly Oak Ridge because of the way it was founded, and the type of community it was, and the type of people who lived here.
MRS. POSTMA: -- I mean really, nobody locked their doors. If you got into town, you had a pass to get into town. Everybody knew who you were and why you were there, and that was part of it, but there was an engagement in the community -- first of all, it was not indigenous to the South or to Tennessee. People came from all over the country. One of the early teachers in the document that I read had commented that she had 22 states represented in her first class in Oak Ridge and another one 16, had commented that she had 16. One teacher said it was the most diverse group of people, and she said easterners, westerners, north, south, Mexicans, Native Americans, Republicans, Democrats, and in this elementary school were nine different religions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: The housing was assigned. I mean the town grew so much faster, they were counting, I think, when they started out, for 13,000 people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: And so, if you were one of the early ones and you got a house, you were lucky, and some of them, the ones who came later, had to live in trailers and hutments, and whatever, but the housing was assigned kind of on need. You didn't get a big house if you didn't have several children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I'm not saying that the superintendent of schools or the head of Carbide didn't get one of the good, bigger houses, but the neighborhoods were extremely classless, if you want to put that, and I think that was a wonderful thing. I remember one time being invited to the home of a friend for supper, and they drank out of Mason jars, and I was amazed. It hadn't occurred to me that some people didn't drink out of glasses. But it was what it was, and I think some of the early teachers commented on, and the students, about coming into the school where everything was new, and they had toilets that worked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: So, for those folks who got brought in who'd lived in rural areas, it was a real eye-opening experience, in terms of the level of services. My dad told me that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were told that all of the public services needed to be in the top quartile of cities in the United States, not comparable size cities or cities in Tennessee, but cities in the United States, and that was certainly true. The tennis courts, the swimming pool is testimony to that; the education system. Leslie Groves went and recruited the first principal at Columbia Teachers College, which was the leading college in the country at the time. This was a man who was 34 at the time, had been superintendent of schools before he went back to get his doctorate degree, and it was said of Leslie Groves that he recruited the scientists, and almost anybody else, I guess, and how he picked Blankenship to interview, I'm not certain of, but he was probably directed to him. This man went back to get his dissertation because he believed education could be done much better than was being done. Groves interviewed him in July, on July 12 -- if I'm remembering correctly -- in the morning, swore him to secrecy, told him about the project, gave him four hours to make up his mind.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this, '40 --
MRS. POSTMA: This was 1943 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- '43, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and, instead, now we're talking mid-July. We have to have an elementary school and the high school open and operating by October 1.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: Two and a half months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: I don't know if he told him there were no schools at the time, but he gave Blankenship four hours to make up his mind, and for a man who had come back to graduate school because he knew it could be done better, I am sure the opportunity to design a school system was -- you couldn't turn that down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: And he, too, was very charismatic and traveled across the country. He brought people from Columbia. He got a number of teachers from Peabody in Nashville, but he went around the country and he had a very magnetic personality, and a few people referred to him as the Pied Piper of Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: But two and a half months now, we are building two schools; how much of that time did it take him to recruit a staff? I don't know, but the week before school was started -- well, he told Groves that for the kind of education they needed, for the people they had to bring here, the scientists, he was going to have to pay New York salaries and we were going to have to have a New York curriculum, and Groves said, "It's yours to do."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: So, the week before school started, he got all the teachers in the brand new Center Theater and said, "What do you want your school system to be like?" He didn't tell them what he wanted. He said, "What do you want? What is your philosophy? What do we need to do?" and part of his plan -- in fact, he said, "We're gonna pay them New York salaries and we're gonna pay them New York salaries for ten months, and we're gonna have a workshop for a week before school and a workshop for a week after school, and one Saturday morning a month," and those became rather famous as the Oak Ridge workshops. They were really interesting to read about. He felt, and it was a radical idea at the time, that teachers, left to their own devices, needed to solve their problems and figure out together what their students needed. The workshops were teachers' groups, and sometimes the whole system met, sometimes it was by grade level, but mostly it was by interest groups, because he felt like if they identified problems and a given set of teachers had the same problem, they would figure something out. A couple of years later, he wrote -- I don't know what you would call it -- a book. It wasn't published as a book, but it was called An Adventure in Democratic Education, and when you read what those teachers wrote, I mean it breaks me up to talk about it. But one teacher said it was like being let out of a dark room into the sunshine to run a race with your ideas, and in Oak Ridge, I learned that there is poetry and there is art in teaching. It was an experience nobody had had before because it had been a very rigid educational system, very bureaucratic, very hierarchical, and I think that spirit is still here in Oak Ridge, and it seems so commonplace now, that, yes, teachers meet together and talk about problems and solve them, but it sure wasn't in 1943, and they extended that to the students. They talked about asking the students to tell what the best thing was at the school they came from, and helped to design the classroom, figure out where they wanted to sit; it just was really a remarkable document to read, I think.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, and that idea, that concept, that vision that he had has borne fruit through the students for years, I mean, you know.
MRS. POSTMA: It really has. One of the remarkable stories about -- and the students helped design the curriculum. I think the teachers were really taken with the idea of the environment, and they could go out in the woods and learn about science and learn about animals and stuff, and so the idea of students helping pick what they studied was very important. After the bomb was dropped and we became aware in Oak Ridge of what had gone on here, the high school students insisted that the teachers change the curriculum, and that they talk about this and what this meant, and the implications of it. They studied the physics of it in science classes. They started Youth -- I can't remember the real name -- the Youth Atomic Council, or something. They talked about the political implications and the humanitarian implications. The students did their own research. They came back and gave reports. They traveled to other states and gave programs. So, this idea of being responsive to what's happening at the time, and the students taking responsibility for their own educations, is really a neat thing, and I think a lot of that legacy still lives. I don't know that students are asked to design the curriculum, and now, teachers are so bound by all of our mandates at state and federal, they probably would love to be able to go back to those old days, with the freedom to say, "This needs to be done," and not, "That needs to be done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: But I think the legacy of responsible education, if you will, it is -- and, you know, one of the unique things about Oak Ridge is so many highly educated parents, and the parents really respected the teachers. There was a lot of support. There was a PTA association from the word “Go”, but we couldn't belong to the national PTA because you weren't allowed to give lists of people's names, who lived here so, they did their own thing. We talk about the science, we talk about the city, the scale and the speed with which it was done, but, for the time, I think our school system was equally unique, and it's a legacy, I think, that's still very strong here.
MR. MCDANIEL: The first two schools that were built were the high school --
MRS. POSTMA: Elm Grove was the first --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Elm Grove. Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- elementary school, and I started in kindergarten there, and then the high school, which was then at Blankenship Field up on Kentucky Avenue was built. Cedar Hill was opened. Let's see. There were 867 students the first day of school here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Cedar Hill was opened in December, but the population grew so fast -- the child population, too, that they had to teach double shifts.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and the schools, when they opened, weren't ready. There was a funny story about they didn't have enough classrooms finished, so they met in the auditorium and they divided up the auditorium, or the gym.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: They were really gyms, not auditoriums then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: And once, you know, about a class that was so anxious that they moved in the classroom before the windows and doors were in, and when it rained they all had to huddle in the corner and do their work. One of the first principals, Herb Dodd, talked about leaving school in the afternoon and driving home on a road that wasn't there when he came in in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: And I'm not sure how quickly the other schools were finished, but I think there were probably four finished by the end of that first year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Now, how long was Dr. Blankenship here?
MRS. POSTMA: He left in 1949, if I'm not mistaken.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so he came and started it and got it going and moved on.
MRS. POSTMA: And had a heck of a reputation by that time, I would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. Now, your father became the Principal, didn't he?
MRS. POSTMA: He did, of the High School. Right. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, he became the Principal of the High School.
MRS. POSTMA: He was Principal at Pine Valley first, and then went on as a Vice Principal for the High School for one year, and then became the Principal, and did that for 20 years. He was asked to apply for the Superintendent's job a couple times, and he said, "I've got the job I want. There's not a better job."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Well, let's get back -- and that's fascinating. I want to come back to your education work. Obviously, you've done a lot of research.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, I got interested in this recently. When that high school class, Jay Searcy's class, wrote their book, our high school class decided they would do one next year. So, I got to thinking about all of that, and my role as the Principal's daughter, and maybe that's what I ought to speak to.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. That’s fine. So, you graduated from Oak Ridge High School --
MRS. POSTMA: I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you went to college.
MRS. POSTMA: I did. I went to Duke in North Carolina. My aims were I was going to live in the big city, Boston or New York, and I was not going to be a teacher, like everybody else in my family, because my sister had decided to be a teacher and my aunts and uncles were teachers. My grandfather was a teacher, and I said, "No, I'm not going to do that," but I was wrong on both counts because I met Herman, my husband, the year before I was a senior at college, and he had taken a permanent job in Oak Ridge that year.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that's when you had come back for the summer?
MRS. POSTMA: Right, right. I came back every summer, and I was lucky enough to get to work in the Library at Y-12, so I got to meet some guys that way, too, and Herman would come flirt with me at the Library.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, you graduated from Duke, and you'd met him and you'd started dating, I guess.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, we had, and so we got married in November of the year I graduated, and I'll have to say, if you're going to stay in one town all your life and raise your family, you couldn't do much better than Oak Ridge. But we traveled a lot, and it was a very cosmopolitan town for the South, certainly, because there were people here from everywhere, and if you're part of the science community, you'd travel everywhere for meetings, and so forth. We spent a year in the Netherlands. Herman's family was Dutch, and so he, a couple years after we were married, applied to have a year's leave and worked at a Dutch physics institute, so we lived in Utrecht, in the Netherlands for a year, which I'm sure got me going on the international stuff that I enjoy so much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Let's take a few minutes and tell me about Herman. Tell me about where he grew up, and something about his life.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. There was a large Dutch community there, flower growers, and Herman's dad had come over when he was 21, I think. His dad dropped out of school in the seventh grade, but he had a lot of street smarts, and he came over as an apprentice, or an intern for a flower grower here, and Herman's mother's family came over and they were in the nursery business in Wilmington when she was two. She was one of ten children --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and she and Herman's dad met and married in Wilmington. It was interesting to me, Herman was kind of an aberration in a way. His dad had dropped out of school in the seventh grade, his mother hated school, and felt like she was not good at it and she couldn't wait until she got out of school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman was extremely bright, incredibly bright. As one of his friends said, "He is right more often than any human being has a right to be." He went to Duke. He graduated before I did, and I guess, he thought he wanted to be a doctor, but somebody got him onto physics at Duke, and so he went to Harvard for graduate school, came here every summer, and joined the Thermonuclear Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Was the Director of the Thermonuclear Division for a little while and when Alvin Weinberg left, Herman was the youngest Director of the National Lab. I'm trying to think whether Thom Mason -- I don't think Thom Mason quite beat him. I think Herman was a little younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: A little younger than Thom.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. Yeah. He also thought he had the best job in the world. He loved the Lab. He had an unusual ability, not just to understand physics, but to grasp almost all of the technologies there, and I used to sit at those state of the Lab addresses that they gave every year, and just really be awed by what was going on there outside of what people thought, you know, nuclear energy and so forth. So, it was an exciting time. He was a real character, very bright, but with a really goofy sense of humor, and sort of uninhibited. I remember when Clyde Hopkins decided they were going to have staff meetings at 7:30 in the morning. Herman went to the first one in pajamas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: He was --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny.
MRS. POSTMA: -- staging a protest or something.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'll tell you an interesting story. I interviewed Bob Hart a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking to Bob about various things, and for people who are listening, Robert Hart was the general manager of Oak Ridge Operations for the Department of Energy, and he made a comment about Herman. We were talking about Alvin Weinberg, actually, and he said, of course, Weinberg was brilliant and he had a lot of passion, and sometimes baggage comes with passion, but he said it was really rare to find someone who had excellent technical understanding and management skills, and he says, "And that was Herman." He said, "Herman had both of those. He really understood the technical aspects of everything that was going on, and he was also a really good manager."
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. I think he championed the women's cause very, very early, and he would say, "Pound for pound, you get a lot more out of a woman than you do out of a man."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: And, also, I think some of the African-American community felt like he worked really well with them. He had no pretensions. He grew up in a humble home, and he couldn't have been less interested in how things looked, what clothes he wore, or anything like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: But he had a really high interest in so many things. I think his level of detail in dealing with anything, I understood early on, I need not worry about doing income taxes because he would never think that anybody else could do it to the same level of detail, and that was fine with me. So, he was really, very well organized and very detail minded, and yet he was a person who, unlike many people, he didn't often bring home his work at night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. I mean he did sometimes, but it certainly wasn't like he sat here for two or three hours every night and did work from the Lab. He managed to keep a pretty well balanced life.
MR. MCDANIEL: But I imagine it was long hours.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. He went earlier than most people, and probably came home later than most people do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. Now, how long was he the manager of the Lab?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, let's see. I think that was from '73 and he retired in '91. Fourteen years.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, he stayed there until he retired, I mean he was --
MRS. POSTMA: Well, he was a Vice President for Lockheed Martin for three or four years before he retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Well, so tell me a little bit about your and Herman's life here in Oak Ridge. After you came back, you got married?
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have children?
MRS. POSTMA: We did. Our son was born when we lived -- and Herman, I think, had lived in every kind of house there was in Oak Ridge while he was a graduate student here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: And then we lived in the garden apartments the first year we were married, and bought a house on West Outer Drive near Delaware. I had my son, Peter, the day we were moving, so Herman got to move without me and some friends who pitched in, and it was shortly after that that we went to the Netherlands for a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Peter was 15 months old when we moved to the Netherlands. We sold the house on Outer Drive, came back, lived in a house that was the friend of my family's, who were away from Oak Ridge for a year, built this house in 1964. It burned down in 1972, and burned down enough that we had to tear it down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Start over.
MRS. POSTMA: -- to start over again, but there's a hole in the ground and it's not any good to anybody else.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's true.
MRS. POSTMA: We lived in friends' houses that year. We rented a house in Woodland that was so tiny and so uncomfortable. I went through a moment there where I said, "We've gotten rid of all this stuff. We don't need all this stuff to live. I'm gonna live a simpler life." But about halfway through that year, I said, "Money and things bring you peace of mind," you know? You don't have to worry, it's there when you need it, and that was a tough year, but we got through it. The house got built back again, and we came back to the same house, and I'm still here.
MR. MCDANIEL: You're still here.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MRS. POSTMA: Having the children in school, I remember one time, when I got my kids' teaching assignments, I realized that my son had a teacher that I had had in the fourth grade, and I thought she was a terrible teacher, and I was appalled that she was still teaching here. But there were so many ways in which the school system was still outstanding, and is still outstanding, and so they were very lucky, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you had Peter, and then you had --
MRS. POSTMA: Pam was born four years later, once we had moved into this house, and she was five and Peter was eight when the house burned down, and that was an interesting lesson for everybody. That happened in the afternoon. By 7:00 that night, when we were staying at my mother's -- my parents lived here in town -- our friends had brought clothes coming out the wazoo, they had got toothbrushes and underwear and games and toys.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Peter's class brought money.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. All of the kids brought their nickels and dimes, and we didn't need the money, but it was -- you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was a way for them to do something, wasn't it?
MRS. POSTMA: So, I think that was a really good learning experience for our kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: A tight community, you know, and everybody knows what's going on here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: Both of them loved to play soccer. That was coming -- they were sort of current with the popularity of that sport.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman used to coach the soccer games --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and the kids both played. Pam hoped to go to UNC because she was really into soccer and they had the best women's team at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and she didn't get to UNC, so she decided to go to Duke instead, like the rest of us. Everybody in the family went to Duke. It was just a great place to grow up, and I think those same spirits of freedom and assumption that life was good, and there were no problems really reigned for our kids, as well as for us, and I've heard other parents say, for their children who have moved elsewhere, they had this feeling that there was something really special about Oak Ridge, and their peers that they met later in life or in college --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right --
MRS. POSTMA: -- didn't have an experience --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- didn't have --
MRS. POSTMA: -- didn't have whatever --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- it like that.
MRS. POSTMA: -- that was. It's hard to characterize it.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, do you think it's still that same way? Do you think there's an element of that still here?
MRS. POSTMA: There's an element, but it isn't the same way. We are much more like a typical Tennessee town, in terms of our socioeconomic characteristics.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: The demographics have changed. The current conversation about the housing stock should have taken place long ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We have some heroic challenges ahead of us. Because the housing stock is here, and we all know this now but we were talking about it five and six years ago, some of us, "What are we gonna do about this?" If you have transients in town because the rents are so cheap and the houses are bad, you have a different set of parents, if there are parents than we had before, who don't value education, who can't help their children even if their children want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Breaking and entering. We used to leave our doors open, but if you don't have a security system -- people are out looking for drugs. It's a terrible problem. The other thing that's changed a lot is people have you might caught up - Hardin Valley, Maryville, Alcoa - you know, in terms of academics, we were so far ahead of the crowd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We modeled and they emulated, and that's a good thing, but we can't claim to be head and shoulders above everybody else academically or athletically.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. The economics have changed. We were a protected city. We had all of our own stores. We're now part of a huge economic region, and we don't have any retail, and we're not going to have much retail because we're an integrated economy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. POSTMA: Eighty percent, 85 percent probably now, of the people who work here, don't live here. That means a lot of the high incomes are elsewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: All of that has changed, and so we have the same sort of struggles that many towns do right now, and we didn't have those for a long time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: I think the element, as you said, is still here, and I'll go back to the new high school that we built five or six years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I want you to talk about that, and the effort that was made for that.
MRS. POSTMA: Well, it was an astounding effort. We shouldn't have been able to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: We shouldn't have even thought we could do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what did we do?
MRS. POSTMA: Well, some of that happened before I came along, that is to say that it really started out from groups of the National Lab who understood, and Jeff Wadsworth was here at the time, that we didn't have the kind of high school that would attract the kind of scientists they needed to recruit to replace the ones who were coming on retirement age, and I thought about that a lot because I grew up here, I went to that High School, I drive by, take my kids there; on the outside, it looked just the same, it looked like the same great, old high school, and they pointed out the physics labs were wildly out of date and the chemistry labs were wildly out of date, and there were some egregious construction problems, or deterioration problems we weren't aware of -- cracks in the foundation. They had replaced some of the heating and ventilation, and, according to the teachers, you could either have air conditioning or you could talk to your students, but you couldn't do both because it was so noisy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: And we really, as a community, even those who kept up with things and had kids there, had gotten sort of complacent and it seemed that we were always good and it was always going to be that way. But it took, I think, those folks at the Lab who began to talk about this, to say, "We really have to do something in Oak Ridge," and how we were going to pay for that was a dubious thing. But I think the contractors and the subcontractors, the major ones, put a lot of pressure on each other. There were a group of people who met informally and talked about how it might be financed. I'd mention Pete Craven as one of the people who will not take any credit, was very instrumental in thinking about some creative ways to finance and identifying federal programs that came through the state that were available to schools with a certain number of low-income pupils, which we always assumed we didn't have, but, when we gathered the data, we did have.
MR. MCDANIEL: We did.
MRS. POSTMA: It has to be really because of the five big people, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and the Lab, Y-12, Bechtel Jacobs, others who committed $5 million quietly, and I know that was an unimaginable thing to begin with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Nobody had ever done anything like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Where was that money going to come from? Why should Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which is a consortium of schools from all over the southeast, and now more, want to give money to Oak Ridge High School, you know? But with that $5,000.00 promise in hand --
MR. MCDANIEL: Five million.
MRS. POSTMA: -- $5 million, yes. Sorry. Five million, we began to talk about using the last bit of sales tax revenue that we hadn't already --
MR. MCDANIEL: Used.
MRS. POSTMA: -- imposed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and if we could raise the sales tax to the maximum amount and guarantee that that last three-quarters of a percent went only to the High School, could we get people to vote for it, and by God, 73 percent of the voters voted for it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: Now, when they started out, they did a survey of the community, they being Bechtel, I think, did a survey of the community, which was a random survey. UT did it, and it was a random survey asking about possible support for a new high school, and I think everybody was astounded at the percentage of people who would support that, including grandparents who didn't have kids in school anymore, and parents who didn't have kids in school anymore, and that kind of gave them the courage to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: So, armed with the $5 million and the sales tax revenue, we needed to come up with another $3 million in private money to meet the requirements for getting this federal funding, QZAR bonds, as they're referred to, and that had to come from people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Oak Ridgers are generous in supporting the arts and charitable causes, but I think a big check for an Oak Ridger was $500.00. It's not that they don't have the money, but they're very careful with their money. Many of us drive the old cars we drove and live in the houses we've lived in for 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: We don't want to call them tight, but you know --
MRS. POSTMA: Well, careful. Careful.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- careful.
MRS. POSTMA: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: So, could we do this? And I got some advice. Herman and I had agreed to lead that campaign to raise the $3 million. He died almost immediately after we agreed to do that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I decided I would go ahead with it. You're kind of on automatic pilot for a period of time after that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: We knew he was in poor health, but I in no way understood that his death was imminent.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I asked a friend who was in development at UT, who had worked with me at the College of Business, if she --
MR. MCDANIEL: What year was this?
MRS. POSTMA: -- oh gosh, this was 2005.
MR. MCDANIEL: 2005.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. Yeah. So, when we kicked it off, we had been talking about it for six months before that and what we would do, and so I asked this friend to help me think about how you go about raising money, and she was extremely helpful, in terms of what do you have to write to make your case, what kinds of things do you have to have down on paper, how do you organize. One of the things that had happened earlier was there was an Oak Ridge Public Schools foundation that got formed in 2001, but it sort of got started and never went anywhere, and some of the original people moved away.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was already organized, so --
MRS. POSTMA: That --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- they already had the papers --
MRS. POSTMA: -- group was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- yes.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and some of the folks who were working on the financing perceived that as constituted that group would not do it or be able to do it, and that we needed a slightly different mission statement.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MRS. POSTMA: So, that was reorganized, and Herman and I were asked to join the board along with a number of other people. So, that was our board we had to work with, and I remember, it was a funny thing, and I mentioned about $500.00 being a big check for Oak Ridgers at the time, Herman was on the Board of Duke University, and he said to this Board of the Foundation that was going to be in charge of helping raise the money, "The Board itself has an obligation in these matters, and I'm on the Board at Duke, and when they did their last fundraising drive, on the average they expected $10 million from each board member," and he said, "I couldn't do that."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: "But I was smart, and so I partnered with Melinda Gates, and together we --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Well, that was his way of putting it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MRS. POSTMA: -- but the point he was making was, we can't all do the same thing, but we all must do something, and later, when it came time to really get started asking the public for money, I said, "Each of us has to make our commitment, however much it is," and we agreed that pacing it for five years, asking people to give a certain amount for five years might work, and I said to the board, "Do you think you could give $1,000.00 a year? Do you think you could give $1,000.00 a year for five years?" And I remember Thom Mason spoke up and he said, "I think I can do that," and somebody else spoke up and said, "I think I can do that," and not everybody else spoke up, but they didn't have to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: The point was made, and everybody decided what they could do and did, and we asked all of the City Council and all of the School Board members to make a commitment before we started out, and they were varying sizes commitment, but it was a five-year pledge. So, we had wonderful publicity. The paper was very helpful to us. We had Kay Brookshire and Karen Bridgeman writing articles for us, and publicizing the things that the schools were doing. So, we really worked hard on it, we had a letter go to every household in the community explaining what we needed to do, and you have to ask for a certain amount, and we did. We asked for a five-year pledge, and we had a pledge card. I can't remember anymore how many people did pledge, but we did get pledges for our $8 million. We had hoped to raise another $4 million for an endowment for the Foundation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- but, over a period of five years, we had the pledges that came in at $8 million, and I think, as I said before, it was not something anybody had ever done before. We got alumni lists, which the school system didn't maintain. We had to scrabble every which way and backwards to get those put together --
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and there were reunion committees that had some, and we would ask people, but we wrote to many, many of the alums asking them to participate, and I thought about the families I knew who had several kids going through school who were very successful, and I said, "I wonder if together, as a family of two parents and three or four kids, these people could give $25,000.00 as a family over five years," and I wrote to some of those that I knew personally, and every last one of them found a way to make that happen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, I'm not talking about hundreds of people. I'm talking about a dozen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, but that's a lot.
MRS. POSTMA: But the thought that this kid was a minister and made no money, but this guy was the Vice President of a big company and he can sort of make it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: So, it was bits and pieces and scrabbles, and some people gave $25.00, but it worked and it was a wonderful, wonderful thing, and that, to me, the biggest lesson, I mean I think the new High School got in that way was more important for Oak Ridge than the original High School that was so great at the time, and it was a collaborative effort on the part of the community, and that's what we will have to do if we're going to meet some of these heroic challenges that I mentioned, and I think we can do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: There are so many people here who are still a part of that early spirit who want Oak Ridge to remain outstanding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: If we really work on it, I think we can do a lot of these things that we need to do, but it's work, and we've got a lot more old people than we used to have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly, and those people are not going to be around forever, you know?
MRS. POSTMA: No, they aren't.
MR. MCDANIEL: There's got to be a mentoring of the younger --
MRS. POSTMA: There are -- right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- folks.
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, I'm amazed at how many of us who were here as young adults are still out there slugging, so the fact that they're 80 years old hasn't made them retire, and we're ornery as ever, and you really can't do everything you used to do, and it's harder because we have fewer young people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Many, as I said, live outside of Oak Ridge, but we have a fairly active group, and we still have the Muddy Boot Award and the Postma Medal for people who are under 40 and making big contributions to the community, and I don't know many of those young people, but I read their bios and what they've been doing, and when you think about kids, people who, by in large, it's a two-income family, we don't have very many mothers who stay at home anymore. So, we've got mom and dad working, and we have them joining groups in the community and working for things, and doing their kids' stuff, and its remarkable what people can do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure. Sure, sure. Well, Pat, thank you so much for talking --
MRS. POSTMA: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- with us, and sharing your story and Herman's story, and I really wanted you to talk about -- I'm glad you talked about the school system, you know, from the very beginning, up through the building of the new High School, and some of your ideas and thoughts about it, so ...
MRS. POSTMA: Well, it's easy to get discouraged because you want things to be like they were, but they aren't, and we can still do good things because this is still, I think, a very unusual place.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, thank you. Thank you.
MRS. POSTMA: Thank you.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF PATRICIA POSTMA
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
November 29, 2011
MR. MCDANIEL: All right. This is Keith McDaniel, and today is Tuesday, November 29, 2011, and I am at the home of Pat Postma, and Pat, thanks for taking time to talk with us.
MRS. POSTMA: I am delighted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Good. Well, we're going to talk about a lot of different things, but I want to start out with you, with your life. Tell me where you were born and raised, and something about your family.
MRS. POSTMA: Well, I was really raised here, but born in eastern Kentucky. My dad had been principal of a mountain boarding school, and decided, when I came along as the second and unexpected child, he needed to earn a little more money, so they went to Lexington and he was teaching in the Army Signal Corps, which is one of the places, apparently, they recruited when they were beginning Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year was this?
MRS. POSTMA: We came here in September of 1943. I was four years old.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: I do vividly remember that first day coming into town, because you know the stories about the mud, and we lived --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- on the corner of Fairview and Tennessee Avenue, and Tennessee was mud and Fairview was mud, and, as we got out of our little car and we were getting ready to carry things up, I got to carry my mother's hat boxes. She was a very stylish lady, and as I got out of the car, she said, "Be careful and don't drop those," and I hadn't taken two steps before I slipped in the mud. So, when we talk about Oak Ridge, it's not generic mud, its hatbox mud.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, this was '43? You were four years old --
MRS. POSTMA: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and your dad came here. What did he come here to do?
MRS. POSTMA: He was an electronics foreman at Y-12. I think he was in one of the calutron buildings, but I'm not sure which one.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Now, did you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. POSTMA: I had an older sister, Mary. She was 15 months older than I am, and later I had a brother, but not at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, you moved to the corner of Tennessee and --
MRS. POSTMA: And Fairview.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and Fairview.
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it a house or apartment?
MRS. POSTMA: It was a B house, and really it looks a lot now, like it did then, although it has siding on it, and, needless to say, the whole yard was mud. But one of the funny things, to me I guess -- I don't know why I would have thought this was funny -- but the closets didn't have doors, they had curtains. I guess, we were probably lucky to have closets.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We used to play hide-and-seek and hide behind those curtains and everything. I remember my folks working really hard, my dad in particular, for the yard, and he would go out somewhere and dig up sod and bring it back. And my folks went out and collected wildflowers, and we had a wildflower garden in the back, so they worked pretty hard to make it look like a --
MR. MCDANIEL: A home.
MRS. POSTMA: -- place that people cared about --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and we lived there until I was in the sixth grade.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. So, what can you remember? What are some of the things you remember about that, those early days from '43 until, I guess, about, what, the late '40s or '50s?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, gosh, a lot of things. I loved the fact that we lived near Jackson Square. That was a block away. If I was lucky enough to have a nickel, I could go get Cherry Cokes, and every time I go to Big Ed's Pizza, I am amazed at how much it still looks like Service Drugstore.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's where Service Drugstore was?
MRS. POSTMA: It was, and the booths, I swear the booths are the same ones they were then, and the wooden floor. It is just really funny. But McCrory's, you know, going to the Five-and-Dime, and walking down all those aisles and seeing all the stuff you really wanted.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, McCrory's, where was it? It was just right down from --
MRS. POSTMA: It was. I'm trying to think. Where Bechtel Jacobs --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- is now.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: It was in that same block with what's now Big Ed's.
MR. MCDANIEL: Past the Ridge Theater right there.
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, and the Music Box on the corner, that was a neat place, but my favorite place was the Library, I loved to read, and the Public Library was just beyond Jackson Square, what was then -- after that was the Executive Building. I don't know what it's used for now. But I would go to the Public Library, and it was such a safe place, the whole world was then, I think, and we could just go anywhere, any time. I would go to the Library and get books, and, as I got older, I would wander around the Library. I didn't stay in the children's section, nobody said I shouldn't go there --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I would just pull a book off the shelf, and if I flipped through a couple pages and liked it, I brought it up, and I am sure I read a lot of things before my time. I got an education that I wouldn't have gotten any other way if I --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- hadn't had that Library to have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Do you remember who the Librarian was?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh no, I don't.
MR. MCDANIEL: I interviewed a lady, and I don't remember her name just right off, but she was the Librarian for 25 or 30 years. So, I don't know if she was there that --
MRS. POSTMA: Then?
MR. MCDANIEL: -- early or not, but --
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- she was.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. So, Jackson Square was a great place to live. As I read other people's -- in Jay Searcy's book, that I'm sure you're familiar with, his high school class wrote about Oak Ridge, everybody talked about the woods, and I hadn't really thought about that. But it's really unusual, I guess, to have a closely-packed town like this, but covered around by woods and in the woods, and we would just wander around and not come home until dark, sort of, and had a great time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, and I imagine there were lots of kids.
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, there were. In particular -- I mean there were a lot of friends. I was two blocks away from Elm Grove School. I was in that first kindergarten class at Elm Grove School, and so, as I walked along to school, there were a lot of my friends who lived there and on the streets we lived on. But, when we moved to New York Avenue when I was in the sixth grade, that's when I really think about the schools had a playground program in the summer that was free, and you could go down on the playground, and our house looked right down on it. We could walk down the hill.
MR. MCDANIEL: Pine, what --
MRS. POSTMA: Pine Valley.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Pine Valley School.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, and my dad was Principal of the High School by then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, no, Principal of Pine Valley at that time --
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- when we moved there. But we'd spend time in the day there, but one of my fondest memories are what we did after dark, and we would play Capture the Flag, about seven or eight of us in the neighborhood, that went all up and down New York Avenue, and go for hours in the summer nights.
MR. MCDANIEL: What's your maiden name?
MRS. POSTMA: Dunigan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. He came here, as I said --
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you lived next to -- Helen was your mother, is that --
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- correct?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay. I wasn't aware of that.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: You lived next to the Wilcox --
MRS. POSTMA: Exactly.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- family, right?
MRS. POSTMA: Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. My dad, he was laid off after the war, like many, many others, and they had come here, as I suppose almost everybody did, with the thought they'd be here during the war and then they'd go back home, wherever that was.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: But they didn't want to leave, and my dad had been a teacher before, and applied to the school system. They hired him with the proviso that he had to get a master's degree. I don't know if you're aware, but back in 1943, when they set up the school, and that is a whole story by itself --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. Of course.
MRS. POSTMA: -- almost every teacher had a master's degree, and you think about that -- how many people didn't even go to college in 19 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- so rare, especially --
MRS. POSTMA: -- right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- for East Tennessee, this area.
MRS. POSTMA: Exactly. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Any school system.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and so one of my real memories from those early days is he spent the summers going to UT. He taught the high school Algebra and Physics, I think, and in the summer went to UT, and I remember my mother typing his thesis.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: There was a card table set up in the middle of the living room floor in our B house, and it was kind of sacred. We sort of tiptoed around it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure. I'm sure. I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I recently got interested in looking up some of that history, and it turned out, even though that was 1949, I guess, when he got his degree, they still have his thesis at the Library --
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I got to read part of it, which was about the Oak Ridge school workshops, and --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- that was really interesting.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, my goodness. So, you moved to New York Avenue --
MRS. POSTMA: We moved to New York Avenue, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- when you were in the sixth grade.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. So, I got to go to Elm Grove. I went in the seventh grade to, what's now, Robertsville. It was called Jefferson then. Then, when they built the new High School, I went to the old High School and that was Jefferson, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Up --
MRS. POSTMA: And so I --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- on the hill?
MRS. POSTMA: -- up on the hill. So, I went to all of the schools, I think, when I was growing up here, and that was kind of neat.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what was it like being a teenager here? This was after the war, this was in the '50s.
MRS. POSTMA: Yes. Right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, you know, tell me about that.
MRS. POSTMA: You know, I think about that, and one of the big things in the life of teenagers, I believe, was the Wildcat Den, and yet, my sister and I never went there, or much. I thought about why that was really central to some people, but not to others, and I don't have an answer for that, but we didn't do that. It was really exciting, in the sense of the high school, even when you're in junior high school, they had championship football teams, and we'd go to the football games along with 12,000 other people, which was pretty remarkable for a high school, to watch, and I couldn't wait until I got to go to the high school itself, because I thought that was great. But my dad got there before I was, he became the principal of the high school, and I thought, "Well, being the principal's daughter had some," -- every now and then, something would come up that made it funny, but on the whole, I thought it was okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: But at my 50th high school reunion, it was really funny how many people, I guess enough time had gone by, came up to me and said, "I spent some time in your dad's office," and, for the most part, I would never have guessed. You know, they were kids who you didn't think of as troublemakers.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MRS. POSTMA: One person, who I didn't really know very well, I knew he was in high school but I didn't know him, and figured he might not know who I was, and I said, "I was Pat Dunigan," and he said, "I know who you were. You were the principal's daughter," and I said, "Yeah, that's right." He paused and he said, "That cost you a lot of boyfriends, girl."
MR. MCDANIEL: How funny.
MRS. POSTMA: You know, I swear, it had never occurred to me. I just didn't think I was the popular type. So, that was kind of a revelation, and I wondered how much else I didn't know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I thought being the principal's daughter was okay, but I didn't know half.
MR. MCDANIEL: And it took 50 years for you to find out.
MRS. POSTMA: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: But there were lots of activities for kids, I guess.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. Well, like I said, the playground programs, and you could be a coach or a -- I don't know whether they called them coaches, but you could work at the playgrounds in the summer, and my sister and I did that some. The swimming pool was a really big deal, and like today, it was terribly crowded. There were heads everywhere and that was a big part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, speaking of the swimming pool, people have told me that at one point, at 5:00, the alarm went off every day at 5:00 --
MRS. POSTMA: Okay, that's right. I had forgotten that.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and that's when everybody knew to leave the swimming pool and go home for supper. Do you remember that?
MRS. POSTMA: -- well, I don't remember that as part of the way, and where we lived on New York Avenue, I could walk to the high school and walk to the swimming pool.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: And we did that, we walked everywhere, really, although for a long time we had a very good bus system here, and that was great. What was really neat was by the time I got to college, Oak Ridge was a haven, or I might -- no, a heaven for single girls. Every summer, the Lab and Y-12 would hire graduate students in science from all over the country from the best schools, and there were dozens of these very bright, young men, and we had a youth group that met at the church. It wasn't really a religious group itself, but every Sunday night there would be 40 or 50 people there, and we'd make some collective dinner or something, and it was just amazing the opportunities to meet people and date, and I did meet my husband that way after many years. He dated everybody else in Oak Ridge before he got around to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: But, I think, that was probably a very unique aspect of Oak Ridge, that this opportunity to meet young people, who were highly educated and from all over the country.
MR. MCDANIEL: As a young person, as you look back on it, do you think there was a downside? Do you think there was something so unique about Oak Ridge that maybe you missed out on something else?
MRS. POSTMA: No, I couldn't possibly see it that way. At one of our reunions, the president of our high school class gave a speech, and he called it Camelot, and that kind of pegs it. My brother-in-law, who didn't grow up here and only knew by hearsay what Oak Ridge was like, said, "You lived in a fairytale."
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: As I think back on it, I think that's true. I mean the whole world was much simpler and safer then, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: And particularly Oak Ridge because of the way it was founded, and the type of community it was, and the type of people who lived here.
MRS. POSTMA: -- I mean really, nobody locked their doors. If you got into town, you had a pass to get into town. Everybody knew who you were and why you were there, and that was part of it, but there was an engagement in the community -- first of all, it was not indigenous to the South or to Tennessee. People came from all over the country. One of the early teachers in the document that I read had commented that she had 22 states represented in her first class in Oak Ridge and another one 16, had commented that she had 16. One teacher said it was the most diverse group of people, and she said easterners, westerners, north, south, Mexicans, Native Americans, Republicans, Democrats, and in this elementary school were nine different religions.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: The housing was assigned. I mean the town grew so much faster, they were counting, I think, when they started out, for 13,000 people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: And so, if you were one of the early ones and you got a house, you were lucky, and some of them, the ones who came later, had to live in trailers and hutments, and whatever, but the housing was assigned kind of on need. You didn't get a big house if you didn't have several children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I'm not saying that the superintendent of schools or the head of Carbide didn't get one of the good, bigger houses, but the neighborhoods were extremely classless, if you want to put that, and I think that was a wonderful thing. I remember one time being invited to the home of a friend for supper, and they drank out of Mason jars, and I was amazed. It hadn't occurred to me that some people didn't drink out of glasses. But it was what it was, and I think some of the early teachers commented on, and the students, about coming into the school where everything was new, and they had toilets that worked.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: So, for those folks who got brought in who'd lived in rural areas, it was a real eye-opening experience, in terms of the level of services. My dad told me that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were told that all of the public services needed to be in the top quartile of cities in the United States, not comparable size cities or cities in Tennessee, but cities in the United States, and that was certainly true. The tennis courts, the swimming pool is testimony to that; the education system. Leslie Groves went and recruited the first principal at Columbia Teachers College, which was the leading college in the country at the time. This was a man who was 34 at the time, had been superintendent of schools before he went back to get his doctorate degree, and it was said of Leslie Groves that he recruited the scientists, and almost anybody else, I guess, and how he picked Blankenship to interview, I'm not certain of, but he was probably directed to him. This man went back to get his dissertation because he believed education could be done much better than was being done. Groves interviewed him in July, on July 12 -- if I'm remembering correctly -- in the morning, swore him to secrecy, told him about the project, gave him four hours to make up his mind.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what year was this, '40 --
MRS. POSTMA: This was 1943 --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- '43, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and, instead, now we're talking mid-July. We have to have an elementary school and the high school open and operating by October 1.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: Two and a half months.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: I don't know if he told him there were no schools at the time, but he gave Blankenship four hours to make up his mind, and for a man who had come back to graduate school because he knew it could be done better, I am sure the opportunity to design a school system was -- you couldn't turn that down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: And he, too, was very charismatic and traveled across the country. He brought people from Columbia. He got a number of teachers from Peabody in Nashville, but he went around the country and he had a very magnetic personality, and a few people referred to him as the Pied Piper of Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: But two and a half months now, we are building two schools; how much of that time did it take him to recruit a staff? I don't know, but the week before school was started -- well, he told Groves that for the kind of education they needed, for the people they had to bring here, the scientists, he was going to have to pay New York salaries and we were going to have to have a New York curriculum, and Groves said, "It's yours to do."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: So, the week before school started, he got all the teachers in the brand new Center Theater and said, "What do you want your school system to be like?" He didn't tell them what he wanted. He said, "What do you want? What is your philosophy? What do we need to do?" and part of his plan -- in fact, he said, "We're gonna pay them New York salaries and we're gonna pay them New York salaries for ten months, and we're gonna have a workshop for a week before school and a workshop for a week after school, and one Saturday morning a month," and those became rather famous as the Oak Ridge workshops. They were really interesting to read about. He felt, and it was a radical idea at the time, that teachers, left to their own devices, needed to solve their problems and figure out together what their students needed. The workshops were teachers' groups, and sometimes the whole system met, sometimes it was by grade level, but mostly it was by interest groups, because he felt like if they identified problems and a given set of teachers had the same problem, they would figure something out. A couple of years later, he wrote -- I don't know what you would call it -- a book. It wasn't published as a book, but it was called An Adventure in Democratic Education, and when you read what those teachers wrote, I mean it breaks me up to talk about it. But one teacher said it was like being let out of a dark room into the sunshine to run a race with your ideas, and in Oak Ridge, I learned that there is poetry and there is art in teaching. It was an experience nobody had had before because it had been a very rigid educational system, very bureaucratic, very hierarchical, and I think that spirit is still here in Oak Ridge, and it seems so commonplace now, that, yes, teachers meet together and talk about problems and solve them, but it sure wasn't in 1943, and they extended that to the students. They talked about asking the students to tell what the best thing was at the school they came from, and helped to design the classroom, figure out where they wanted to sit; it just was really a remarkable document to read, I think.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, and that idea, that concept, that vision that he had has borne fruit through the students for years, I mean, you know.
MRS. POSTMA: It really has. One of the remarkable stories about -- and the students helped design the curriculum. I think the teachers were really taken with the idea of the environment, and they could go out in the woods and learn about science and learn about animals and stuff, and so the idea of students helping pick what they studied was very important. After the bomb was dropped and we became aware in Oak Ridge of what had gone on here, the high school students insisted that the teachers change the curriculum, and that they talk about this and what this meant, and the implications of it. They studied the physics of it in science classes. They started Youth -- I can't remember the real name -- the Youth Atomic Council, or something. They talked about the political implications and the humanitarian implications. The students did their own research. They came back and gave reports. They traveled to other states and gave programs. So, this idea of being responsive to what's happening at the time, and the students taking responsibility for their own educations, is really a neat thing, and I think a lot of that legacy still lives. I don't know that students are asked to design the curriculum, and now, teachers are so bound by all of our mandates at state and federal, they probably would love to be able to go back to those old days, with the freedom to say, "This needs to be done," and not, "That needs to be done."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: But I think the legacy of responsible education, if you will, it is -- and, you know, one of the unique things about Oak Ridge is so many highly educated parents, and the parents really respected the teachers. There was a lot of support. There was a PTA association from the word “Go”, but we couldn't belong to the national PTA because you weren't allowed to give lists of people's names, who lived here so, they did their own thing. We talk about the science, we talk about the city, the scale and the speed with which it was done, but, for the time, I think our school system was equally unique, and it's a legacy, I think, that's still very strong here.
MR. MCDANIEL: The first two schools that were built were the high school --
MRS. POSTMA: Elm Grove was the first --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- Elm Grove. Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: -- elementary school, and I started in kindergarten there, and then the high school, which was then at Blankenship Field up on Kentucky Avenue was built. Cedar Hill was opened. Let's see. There were 867 students the first day of school here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Cedar Hill was opened in December, but the population grew so fast -- the child population, too, that they had to teach double shifts.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and the schools, when they opened, weren't ready. There was a funny story about they didn't have enough classrooms finished, so they met in the auditorium and they divided up the auditorium, or the gym.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: They were really gyms, not auditoriums then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: And once, you know, about a class that was so anxious that they moved in the classroom before the windows and doors were in, and when it rained they all had to huddle in the corner and do their work. One of the first principals, Herb Dodd, talked about leaving school in the afternoon and driving home on a road that wasn't there when he came in in the morning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: And I'm not sure how quickly the other schools were finished, but I think there were probably four finished by the end of that first year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, right. Now, how long was Dr. Blankenship here?
MRS. POSTMA: He left in 1949, if I'm not mistaken.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, so he came and started it and got it going and moved on.
MRS. POSTMA: And had a heck of a reputation by that time, I would say.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure, I'm sure. Now, your father became the Principal, didn't he?
MRS. POSTMA: He did, of the High School. Right. Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, he became the Principal of the High School.
MRS. POSTMA: He was Principal at Pine Valley first, and then went on as a Vice Principal for the High School for one year, and then became the Principal, and did that for 20 years. He was asked to apply for the Superintendent's job a couple times, and he said, "I've got the job I want. There's not a better job."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Well, let's get back -- and that's fascinating. I want to come back to your education work. Obviously, you've done a lot of research.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, I got interested in this recently. When that high school class, Jay Searcy's class, wrote their book, our high school class decided they would do one next year. So, I got to thinking about all of that, and my role as the Principal's daughter, and maybe that's what I ought to speak to.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's fine. That’s fine. So, you graduated from Oak Ridge High School --
MRS. POSTMA: I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- and you went to college.
MRS. POSTMA: I did. I went to Duke in North Carolina. My aims were I was going to live in the big city, Boston or New York, and I was not going to be a teacher, like everybody else in my family, because my sister had decided to be a teacher and my aunts and uncles were teachers. My grandfather was a teacher, and I said, "No, I'm not going to do that," but I was wrong on both counts because I met Herman, my husband, the year before I was a senior at college, and he had taken a permanent job in Oak Ridge that year.
MR. MCDANIEL: And that's when you had come back for the summer?
MRS. POSTMA: Right, right. I came back every summer, and I was lucky enough to get to work in the Library at Y-12, so I got to meet some guys that way, too, and Herman would come flirt with me at the Library.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay. All right. So, you graduated from Duke, and you'd met him and you'd started dating, I guess.
MRS. POSTMA: Right, we had, and so we got married in November of the year I graduated, and I'll have to say, if you're going to stay in one town all your life and raise your family, you couldn't do much better than Oak Ridge. But we traveled a lot, and it was a very cosmopolitan town for the South, certainly, because there were people here from everywhere, and if you're part of the science community, you'd travel everywhere for meetings, and so forth. We spent a year in the Netherlands. Herman's family was Dutch, and so he, a couple years after we were married, applied to have a year's leave and worked at a Dutch physics institute, so we lived in Utrecht, in the Netherlands for a year, which I'm sure got me going on the international stuff that I enjoy so much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Let's take a few minutes and tell me about Herman. Tell me about where he grew up, and something about his life.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. There was a large Dutch community there, flower growers, and Herman's dad had come over when he was 21, I think. His dad dropped out of school in the seventh grade, but he had a lot of street smarts, and he came over as an apprentice, or an intern for a flower grower here, and Herman's mother's family came over and they were in the nursery business in Wilmington when she was two. She was one of ten children --
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and she and Herman's dad met and married in Wilmington. It was interesting to me, Herman was kind of an aberration in a way. His dad had dropped out of school in the seventh grade, his mother hated school, and felt like she was not good at it and she couldn't wait until she got out of school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman was extremely bright, incredibly bright. As one of his friends said, "He is right more often than any human being has a right to be." He went to Duke. He graduated before I did, and I guess, he thought he wanted to be a doctor, but somebody got him onto physics at Duke, and so he went to Harvard for graduate school, came here every summer, and joined the Thermonuclear Division.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Was the Director of the Thermonuclear Division for a little while and when Alvin Weinberg left, Herman was the youngest Director of the National Lab. I'm trying to think whether Thom Mason -- I don't think Thom Mason quite beat him. I think Herman was a little younger.
MR. MCDANIEL: A little younger than Thom.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. Yeah. He also thought he had the best job in the world. He loved the Lab. He had an unusual ability, not just to understand physics, but to grasp almost all of the technologies there, and I used to sit at those state of the Lab addresses that they gave every year, and just really be awed by what was going on there outside of what people thought, you know, nuclear energy and so forth. So, it was an exciting time. He was a real character, very bright, but with a really goofy sense of humor, and sort of uninhibited. I remember when Clyde Hopkins decided they were going to have staff meetings at 7:30 in the morning. Herman went to the first one in pajamas.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: He was --
MR. MCDANIEL: That's funny.
MRS. POSTMA: -- staging a protest or something.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'll tell you an interesting story. I interviewed Bob Hart a couple of weeks ago, and I was talking to Bob about various things, and for people who are listening, Robert Hart was the general manager of Oak Ridge Operations for the Department of Energy, and he made a comment about Herman. We were talking about Alvin Weinberg, actually, and he said, of course, Weinberg was brilliant and he had a lot of passion, and sometimes baggage comes with passion, but he said it was really rare to find someone who had excellent technical understanding and management skills, and he says, "And that was Herman." He said, "Herman had both of those. He really understood the technical aspects of everything that was going on, and he was also a really good manager."
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. I think he championed the women's cause very, very early, and he would say, "Pound for pound, you get a lot more out of a woman than you do out of a man."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Okay.
MRS. POSTMA: And, also, I think some of the African-American community felt like he worked really well with them. He had no pretensions. He grew up in a humble home, and he couldn't have been less interested in how things looked, what clothes he wore, or anything like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: But he had a really high interest in so many things. I think his level of detail in dealing with anything, I understood early on, I need not worry about doing income taxes because he would never think that anybody else could do it to the same level of detail, and that was fine with me. So, he was really, very well organized and very detail minded, and yet he was a person who, unlike many people, he didn't often bring home his work at night.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. I mean he did sometimes, but it certainly wasn't like he sat here for two or three hours every night and did work from the Lab. He managed to keep a pretty well balanced life.
MR. MCDANIEL: But I imagine it was long hours.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. He went earlier than most people, and probably came home later than most people do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. Now, how long was he the manager of the Lab?
MRS. POSTMA: Oh, let's see. I think that was from '73 and he retired in '91. Fourteen years.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, he stayed there until he retired, I mean he was --
MRS. POSTMA: Well, he was a Vice President for Lockheed Martin for three or four years before he retired.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. Well, so tell me a little bit about your and Herman's life here in Oak Ridge. After you came back, you got married?
MRS. POSTMA: Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: Did you have children?
MRS. POSTMA: We did. Our son was born when we lived -- and Herman, I think, had lived in every kind of house there was in Oak Ridge while he was a graduate student here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: And then we lived in the garden apartments the first year we were married, and bought a house on West Outer Drive near Delaware. I had my son, Peter, the day we were moving, so Herman got to move without me and some friends who pitched in, and it was shortly after that that we went to the Netherlands for a year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MRS. POSTMA: Peter was 15 months old when we moved to the Netherlands. We sold the house on Outer Drive, came back, lived in a house that was the friend of my family's, who were away from Oak Ridge for a year, built this house in 1964. It burned down in 1972, and burned down enough that we had to tear it down --
MR. MCDANIEL: Start over.
MRS. POSTMA: -- to start over again, but there's a hole in the ground and it's not any good to anybody else.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's true.
MRS. POSTMA: We lived in friends' houses that year. We rented a house in Woodland that was so tiny and so uncomfortable. I went through a moment there where I said, "We've gotten rid of all this stuff. We don't need all this stuff to live. I'm gonna live a simpler life." But about halfway through that year, I said, "Money and things bring you peace of mind," you know? You don't have to worry, it's there when you need it, and that was a tough year, but we got through it. The house got built back again, and we came back to the same house, and I'm still here.
MR. MCDANIEL: You're still here.
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: My goodness.
MRS. POSTMA: Having the children in school, I remember one time, when I got my kids' teaching assignments, I realized that my son had a teacher that I had had in the fourth grade, and I thought she was a terrible teacher, and I was appalled that she was still teaching here. But there were so many ways in which the school system was still outstanding, and is still outstanding, and so they were very lucky, too.
MR. MCDANIEL: And you had Peter, and then you had --
MRS. POSTMA: Pam was born four years later, once we had moved into this house, and she was five and Peter was eight when the house burned down, and that was an interesting lesson for everybody. That happened in the afternoon. By 7:00 that night, when we were staying at my mother's -- my parents lived here in town -- our friends had brought clothes coming out the wazoo, they had got toothbrushes and underwear and games and toys.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Peter's class brought money.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah. All of the kids brought their nickels and dimes, and we didn't need the money, but it was -- you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: It was a way for them to do something, wasn't it?
MRS. POSTMA: So, I think that was a really good learning experience for our kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: A tight community, you know, and everybody knows what's going on here.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
MRS. POSTMA: Both of them loved to play soccer. That was coming -- they were sort of current with the popularity of that sport.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Herman used to coach the soccer games --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did he?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and the kids both played. Pam hoped to go to UNC because she was really into soccer and they had the best women's team at the time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Yeah, and she didn't get to UNC, so she decided to go to Duke instead, like the rest of us. Everybody in the family went to Duke. It was just a great place to grow up, and I think those same spirits of freedom and assumption that life was good, and there were no problems really reigned for our kids, as well as for us, and I've heard other parents say, for their children who have moved elsewhere, they had this feeling that there was something really special about Oak Ridge, and their peers that they met later in life or in college --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right --
MRS. POSTMA: -- didn't have an experience --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- didn't have --
MRS. POSTMA: -- didn't have whatever --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- it like that.
MRS. POSTMA: -- that was. It's hard to characterize it.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, do you think it's still that same way? Do you think there's an element of that still here?
MRS. POSTMA: There's an element, but it isn't the same way. We are much more like a typical Tennessee town, in terms of our socioeconomic characteristics.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: The demographics have changed. The current conversation about the housing stock should have taken place long ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We have some heroic challenges ahead of us. Because the housing stock is here, and we all know this now but we were talking about it five and six years ago, some of us, "What are we gonna do about this?" If you have transients in town because the rents are so cheap and the houses are bad, you have a different set of parents, if there are parents than we had before, who don't value education, who can't help their children even if their children want to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Breaking and entering. We used to leave our doors open, but if you don't have a security system -- people are out looking for drugs. It's a terrible problem. The other thing that's changed a lot is people have you might caught up - Hardin Valley, Maryville, Alcoa - you know, in terms of academics, we were so far ahead of the crowd.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: We modeled and they emulated, and that's a good thing, but we can't claim to be head and shoulders above everybody else academically or athletically.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. The economics have changed. We were a protected city. We had all of our own stores. We're now part of a huge economic region, and we don't have any retail, and we're not going to have much retail because we're an integrated economy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MRS. POSTMA: Eighty percent, 85 percent probably now, of the people who work here, don't live here. That means a lot of the high incomes are elsewhere.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: All of that has changed, and so we have the same sort of struggles that many towns do right now, and we didn't have those for a long time.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: I think the element, as you said, is still here, and I'll go back to the new high school that we built five or six years ago.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, I want you to talk about that, and the effort that was made for that.
MRS. POSTMA: Well, it was an astounding effort. We shouldn't have been able to do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: We shouldn't have even thought we could do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, what did we do?
MRS. POSTMA: Well, some of that happened before I came along, that is to say that it really started out from groups of the National Lab who understood, and Jeff Wadsworth was here at the time, that we didn't have the kind of high school that would attract the kind of scientists they needed to recruit to replace the ones who were coming on retirement age, and I thought about that a lot because I grew up here, I went to that High School, I drive by, take my kids there; on the outside, it looked just the same, it looked like the same great, old high school, and they pointed out the physics labs were wildly out of date and the chemistry labs were wildly out of date, and there were some egregious construction problems, or deterioration problems we weren't aware of -- cracks in the foundation. They had replaced some of the heating and ventilation, and, according to the teachers, you could either have air conditioning or you could talk to your students, but you couldn't do both because it was so noisy.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow.
MRS. POSTMA: And we really, as a community, even those who kept up with things and had kids there, had gotten sort of complacent and it seemed that we were always good and it was always going to be that way. But it took, I think, those folks at the Lab who began to talk about this, to say, "We really have to do something in Oak Ridge," and how we were going to pay for that was a dubious thing. But I think the contractors and the subcontractors, the major ones, put a lot of pressure on each other. There were a group of people who met informally and talked about how it might be financed. I'd mention Pete Craven as one of the people who will not take any credit, was very instrumental in thinking about some creative ways to finance and identifying federal programs that came through the state that were available to schools with a certain number of low-income pupils, which we always assumed we didn't have, but, when we gathered the data, we did have.
MR. MCDANIEL: We did.
MRS. POSTMA: It has to be really because of the five big people, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and the Lab, Y-12, Bechtel Jacobs, others who committed $5 million quietly, and I know that was an unimaginable thing to begin with.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: Nobody had ever done anything like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Where was that money going to come from? Why should Oak Ridge Associated Universities, which is a consortium of schools from all over the southeast, and now more, want to give money to Oak Ridge High School, you know? But with that $5,000.00 promise in hand --
MR. MCDANIEL: Five million.
MRS. POSTMA: -- $5 million, yes. Sorry. Five million, we began to talk about using the last bit of sales tax revenue that we hadn't already --
MR. MCDANIEL: Used.
MRS. POSTMA: -- imposed --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and if we could raise the sales tax to the maximum amount and guarantee that that last three-quarters of a percent went only to the High School, could we get people to vote for it, and by God, 73 percent of the voters voted for it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right.
MRS. POSTMA: Now, when they started out, they did a survey of the community, they being Bechtel, I think, did a survey of the community, which was a random survey. UT did it, and it was a random survey asking about possible support for a new high school, and I think everybody was astounded at the percentage of people who would support that, including grandparents who didn't have kids in school anymore, and parents who didn't have kids in school anymore, and that kind of gave them the courage to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: So, armed with the $5 million and the sales tax revenue, we needed to come up with another $3 million in private money to meet the requirements for getting this federal funding, QZAR bonds, as they're referred to, and that had to come from people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Oak Ridgers are generous in supporting the arts and charitable causes, but I think a big check for an Oak Ridger was $500.00. It's not that they don't have the money, but they're very careful with their money. Many of us drive the old cars we drove and live in the houses we've lived in for 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: We don't want to call them tight, but you know --
MRS. POSTMA: Well, careful. Careful.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- careful.
MRS. POSTMA: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: So, could we do this? And I got some advice. Herman and I had agreed to lead that campaign to raise the $3 million. He died almost immediately after we agreed to do that --
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MRS. POSTMA: -- and I decided I would go ahead with it. You're kind of on automatic pilot for a period of time after that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: We knew he was in poor health, but I in no way understood that his death was imminent.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: I asked a friend who was in development at UT, who had worked with me at the College of Business, if she --
MR. MCDANIEL: What year was this?
MRS. POSTMA: -- oh gosh, this was 2005.
MR. MCDANIEL: 2005.
MRS. POSTMA: Right. Yeah. So, when we kicked it off, we had been talking about it for six months before that and what we would do, and so I asked this friend to help me think about how you go about raising money, and she was extremely helpful, in terms of what do you have to write to make your case, what kinds of things do you have to have down on paper, how do you organize. One of the things that had happened earlier was there was an Oak Ridge Public Schools foundation that got formed in 2001, but it sort of got started and never went anywhere, and some of the original people moved away.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was already organized, so --
MRS. POSTMA: That --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- they already had the papers --
MRS. POSTMA: -- group was there --
MR. MCDANIEL: -- yes.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and some of the folks who were working on the financing perceived that as constituted that group would not do it or be able to do it, and that we needed a slightly different mission statement.
MR. MCDANIEL: I see.
MRS. POSTMA: So, that was reorganized, and Herman and I were asked to join the board along with a number of other people. So, that was our board we had to work with, and I remember, it was a funny thing, and I mentioned about $500.00 being a big check for Oak Ridgers at the time, Herman was on the Board of Duke University, and he said to this Board of the Foundation that was going to be in charge of helping raise the money, "The Board itself has an obligation in these matters, and I'm on the Board at Duke, and when they did their last fundraising drive, on the average they expected $10 million from each board member," and he said, "I couldn't do that."
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: "But I was smart, and so I partnered with Melinda Gates, and together we --
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: Well, that was his way of putting it --
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure. Exactly.
MRS. POSTMA: -- but the point he was making was, we can't all do the same thing, but we all must do something, and later, when it came time to really get started asking the public for money, I said, "Each of us has to make our commitment, however much it is," and we agreed that pacing it for five years, asking people to give a certain amount for five years might work, and I said to the board, "Do you think you could give $1,000.00 a year? Do you think you could give $1,000.00 a year for five years?" And I remember Thom Mason spoke up and he said, "I think I can do that," and somebody else spoke up and said, "I think I can do that," and not everybody else spoke up, but they didn't have to.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: The point was made, and everybody decided what they could do and did, and we asked all of the City Council and all of the School Board members to make a commitment before we started out, and they were varying sizes commitment, but it was a five-year pledge. So, we had wonderful publicity. The paper was very helpful to us. We had Kay Brookshire and Karen Bridgeman writing articles for us, and publicizing the things that the schools were doing. So, we really worked hard on it, we had a letter go to every household in the community explaining what we needed to do, and you have to ask for a certain amount, and we did. We asked for a five-year pledge, and we had a pledge card. I can't remember anymore how many people did pledge, but we did get pledges for our $8 million. We had hoped to raise another $4 million for an endowment for the Foundation --
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: -- but, over a period of five years, we had the pledges that came in at $8 million, and I think, as I said before, it was not something anybody had ever done before. We got alumni lists, which the school system didn't maintain. We had to scrabble every which way and backwards to get those put together --
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure.
MRS. POSTMA: -- and there were reunion committees that had some, and we would ask people, but we wrote to many, many of the alums asking them to participate, and I thought about the families I knew who had several kids going through school who were very successful, and I said, "I wonder if together, as a family of two parents and three or four kids, these people could give $25,000.00 as a family over five years," and I wrote to some of those that I knew personally, and every last one of them found a way to make that happen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, I'm not talking about hundreds of people. I'm talking about a dozen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, but that's a lot.
MRS. POSTMA: But the thought that this kid was a minister and made no money, but this guy was the Vice President of a big company and he can sort of make it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: So, it was bits and pieces and scrabbles, and some people gave $25.00, but it worked and it was a wonderful, wonderful thing, and that, to me, the biggest lesson, I mean I think the new High School got in that way was more important for Oak Ridge than the original High School that was so great at the time, and it was a collaborative effort on the part of the community, and that's what we will have to do if we're going to meet some of these heroic challenges that I mentioned, and I think we can do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: There are so many people here who are still a part of that early spirit who want Oak Ridge to remain outstanding.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MRS. POSTMA: If we really work on it, I think we can do a lot of these things that we need to do, but it's work, and we've got a lot more old people than we used to have.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly, and those people are not going to be around forever, you know?
MRS. POSTMA: No, they aren't.
MR. MCDANIEL: There's got to be a mentoring of the younger --
MRS. POSTMA: There are -- right, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- folks.
MRS. POSTMA: I mean, I'm amazed at how many of us who were here as young adults are still out there slugging, so the fact that they're 80 years old hasn't made them retire, and we're ornery as ever, and you really can't do everything you used to do, and it's harder because we have fewer young people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MRS. POSTMA: Many, as I said, live outside of Oak Ridge, but we have a fairly active group, and we still have the Muddy Boot Award and the Postma Medal for people who are under 40 and making big contributions to the community, and I don't know many of those young people, but I read their bios and what they've been doing, and when you think about kids, people who, by in large, it's a two-income family, we don't have very many mothers who stay at home anymore. So, we've got mom and dad working, and we have them joining groups in the community and working for things, and doing their kids' stuff, and its remarkable what people can do.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh sure. Sure, sure. Well, Pat, thank you so much for talking --
MRS. POSTMA: My pleasure.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- with us, and sharing your story and Herman's story, and I really wanted you to talk about -- I'm glad you talked about the school system, you know, from the very beginning, up through the building of the new High School, and some of your ideas and thoughts about it, so ...
MRS. POSTMA: Well, it's easy to get discouraged because you want things to be like they were, but they aren't, and we can still do good things because this is still, I think, a very unusual place.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, thank you. Thank you.
MRS. POSTMA: Thank you.
[End of Interview]